Just One Bite
by Syl Evanesco
Summary: This is the correct doccument, it will take me a while to finish posting everything, so be patient and enjoy my zombie story based off of a dream I had
1. First Bite

_Courtney's Death_

Her breath came out in foggy gusts as her legs pounded harder against the cracked pavement. This was routine, this was a life, and this was what she wanted. She ran harder down the road, un aware that she was no longer at the top of the food-chain. Red, cracked eyes watched her from behind the trees, glowing in the early morning sun. But she didn't see them; her eyes were focused on the road ahead. Unfortunately for her, she wasn't as fast as she wished to be, her watcher could tell. It moved quickly behind her, the sent of her fresh blood was intoxicating to its brainless corpse. It was driven on pure instinct with no human emotion or morals left in it. Grabbing her by the shoulders it pushed her down, going into a tumble and ending up pinning her down in the middle of the deserted road. A scream was built up inside of her throat, but it never made it past her shaking lips. Its rotted teeth tore at her neck and shoulders, chewing on her thin pale flesh quickly as she bled out on the street. It didn't take long for the life to be completely drained from her eyes. Her flesh was no longer fresh to its taste and soon it left her body alone, not wanting to be around when she woke up as a creature similar to the one that had taken her life.

She was a newly born monster, one with a sense of where to go to feed, several miles behind her, and back to the place her human mind once called home. The drive for fresh food was the only thing she knew now; it was more obvious in her eyes than by the looks of her thin body.


	2. The Christmas Card Home

Christmas was a time for celebration, a time for giving thanks, and a time meant for spending it with family and close friends. Every year my family would have the usual parties, with distant relatives that we would only see one time a year, with friends that we only kept in touch with due to tradition. But also, they allowed me to have my annual gathering. It was never anything big, just a few close friends would come over, eat pizza, exchange presents, stay the night, and sleep in until all hours of the afternoon the next day. It was a tradition that we started only two years ago, so it wasn't an old thing for everyone, but we were trying to make it one.

This year however, was no different than the last. Snow blanketed the roads and hills that surrounded my house, giving off the air of a greeting card picture from the looks of the trees almost forming an arch way over my driveway. The only thing that had changed since the last time my friends were here was that we had completed the addition on the house. Now, an extra garage, workshop, three bedrooms and a bigger family new were added onto the right side of our already nice sized house. My room was on the far left side, right above the front of the workshop, my sister Ashley's room was right across from it, the family room right beside it, and Courtney's room, diagonal from it. There was a small balcony from in between Ashley and I's rooms that looked over the driveway, and a deck that wrapped around, beginning at the family room, hanging over top of a twenty foot drop, and wrapped around the entire second story of our already existing home. There was a thirteen foot gap between the edge of the deck and the top of the cliff; nothing was really supposed to be there, my dad just never got around to filling it with cement after he finished the addition last year.

The only doors on the lower level that was half way underground, where the two garage doors that were made by my father. They were extremely heavy, and made of some type of steel, the exact type I can't remember the name. There was one door that connected the two rooms and one door from the garage that lead into the house. We used to have a sliding glass door around the front of the house, but due to security reasons and that it was really old, he decided that it wasn't worth keeping around, so he filled the empty space with matching brick to go along with the rest of the exterior.

There was only one set of stairs that went up to the second floor, right in between the open work out room, complete with bow flex, treadmill, updated stereo system, yoga mats, Pilates and taebo tapes with a small TV, and extra weights, and the hot tub room, nothing really in there other than an eight person hot tub, a cabinet with towels and speakers connected with the system in the adjoining room. To the side of that was my fathers' office, the only room down there with two windows, the work out room only having one. Beside that, in a completely concrete room is our storage room, it would be pointless to list out everything that was in there. In front of the steps was what used to be considered a wet bar, but we just use it, well, come to think about it, we don't really use it. And behind that, another concrete room, but this was our basement bathroom. The entire basement was built from concrete, cement, and brick, and painted cream, technically an off white. It was pretty much impossible to get into unless you smashed through the two windows, the doors were all made out of heavy wood and the only way into the basement, was through the garage.

Upstairs we had a living room, open dining room that was right beside the kitchen, complete with a small bar and six tall standing chairs that surrounded the L shaped island. Turning right, when heading from the stairs into the open room, would lead you down the hall to the new addition, turning left would lead you down another hall. At the very end was my parents master bedroom, to the left, my sister and I's bathroom, and to the right, my mothers office. Right beside my parents bedroom was the only guest bedroom that we had, queen size bed, small dresser and a rather large closet, for those friends that never seem to want to leave. That used to be my old room, and was painted dark red with rose covered blankets lying on the bed. In my parents bedroom, over top of their walk in closet and personal bathroom, was the small attic that our house had. The only entrance to it was through the closet, and right now it was hidden due to a fresh coat of paint that sealed it shut. The last room of our house was the laundry room / pantry that was through the door just behind the dining room table.

Our house wasn't huge, but it also wasn't small. It was a rather good size, and after we fixed it up, was probably the nicest house in our small town. The nearest house to us was through a short path in the woods, and there was no stores within twenty miles, with the exception of a small gas station that was right off the interstate, seven minutes away. The roads were always hard to travel on in this type of weather; they were curvy, steep and narrow. Unless you had four wheel drive, it was literally impossible to access our house by motor vehicle. See, I lived on the side of a mountain, not at the top, not at the bottom, in the middle, almost perfectly in the middle. At the bottom rested our barn yard, filled with apple trees, freshly planted pine trees, a swimming pool, trampoline, creek, brush piles, and an actual barn that housed my fathers tractors, tools, and things that we didn't use.

I guess that gives you a good idea of where I live, just remember that it's all covered in snow, that is important to my story. But now, I guess you're wondering what the heck the story is. Well, I'm getting to that. I guess I should start with the day of the party, after all, that is when it all started.


	3. Bloody Dreams

_The Dreams_

I had been in my room the majority of the morning, not cleaning, not sleeping, and not really doing anything important. Just making sure I had everything on the mental list I had made the night previous. Food, check, presents, check, movies, check, music, check, drinks, check, made sure everyone was coming, check. It was all done, now was the hardest part, waiting. I was anxious, what else would I be? The only thing I found distracting until my first guest showed up, was dancing around in my room, listening to my cds.

I loved my room, well, my new room I should say. Due to the problems that we had when we didn't have the addition, we now had good, almost completely sound proof rooms, something that we didn't have before. So I could play my music as loud as I wanted and scream the lyrics without getting into trouble for annoying my two younger sisters. My room was already clean, dusted, swept, bed made, and everything was organized. I kept glancing out the window that looked over the original garage that we had, in hopes to be able to see someone coming, but it was pointless. The garage's roof was at such an angle that it was near impossible to see anything unless I opened my window and stuck my head out as far as it would go, and I wasn't willing to do that in this weather.

"Does it run in your blood to betray the one's that you love? Yes it runs in your blood to betray the one's that you love!!"

I had the cd on shuffle and was singing along, standing on my bed, hairbrush in hand, eyes closed and absorbed by trying to feel the music. In fact, I was so wrapped up in just singing that I wasn't paying attention to the clock, or the door anymore. Normally people call before the come to someone's house, but not my friends. They've grown so accustom to my house that they know just to let themselves in and come on up. My parents love them, and trust them around our stuff, not to mention my friends actually talk to my parents and don't try to act all superior to them.

"You know, if you sing any louder you're going to break the glass!" The music had stopped suddenly and the new voice scared me out of my own skin.

I screamed and feel instantly off my bed, landing hard on my butt, blonde hair, flying in my face.

"Laura Anne Carroll!" I screamed at my friend, who was standing next to my CD player, holding her sides from laughing at me. "That's not funny! I could have died or something."

"Let me guess, from a heart attack?" She asked, tossing her stuff in the floor next to my bed and searching for a new cd to put in. I was by far the jumpiest person everyone knew and was in constant danger from dieing of an unpredicted heart attack from being scared out of my mind so many times.

"No one believes me, but you guys scare me so much, some day it will happen."

"You keep telling yourself that Nikki. Aha! I knew you had the new Simple Plan cd!"

"I told you I did, but you weren't listening J-Lo." I said, putting in the cd, pressing play, turning it down slightly so we wouldn't have to yell over it, and taking a seat in the rolling chair at my desk. I referred to her as J-Lo due to the fact her rear end was her most predominant feature.

"Is no one else here yet?" She asked, lying down on my bed while I logged onto the internet.

"Nope, they said they wouldn't be here until at least 4. They have work and everything."

"Sure they do. Who all is coming again?"

"Laura M, Carl, Robert, Little Nikki, Trevor, Sheena, Laura W, Breanna, and I think that's it. What the heck." I mumbled the last part to myself when my computer kept saying there was no signal for it to log onto.

"That's more than last year."

"Yeah I know, but more and more people want to come, something about feeling left out."

"So is everyone staying the night?"

"I think so. Not that we're going to sleep though with what Trevor and I have planned, a Nightmare on Elm Street marathon." I tried again to log online, but this time it just shut itself down.

"Laura, or miss must watch romantic comedies only, isn't going to like that very much." It sometimes got confusing have three friends with the same name, which is another reason why I started calling my best friend J-Lo, and Laura Wilson Pothead, even though she had never smoked weed a day in her life.

"Oh yes she will. Majority vote, we're in a democracy aren't we?"

"She's going to kill us."

"Then we'd be able to finally get some decent sleep."

"Are you still having those weird dreams?"

I nodded, trying so hard to block out the images of blood and the smell of dead bodies from returning to me during my waking hours. "They're getting worse, and I don't know what they mean or anything."

"Have you been watching any Zombie movies lately?"

I shook my head, getting up from my seat at my laptop and taking a seat on the bed, bringing my stuffed rabbit into my lap. "Nope, haven't watched one in weeks, but every night I get chills and can't ever remember the details. All I can remember is the biting, the death and thee blood."

"I wouldn't tell the rest of them," meaning the rest of our friends, "They might seriously want to commit you."

I didn't laugh, it wasn't a joke, everyone thought I took my movies and dreams far too seriously, and sometimes I thought so too. But it was all just too real to me. Like I knew when something bad was going to happen. It had happened to me too many times to count for me to dismiss it at just night terrors. It wasn't always about Zombies, sometimes it was about car crashes, or insane asylums, and others it was just about death. All those happened right before my friend got into a near fatal car crash, and my uncle got locked away for showing signs of Dementia, a very bad form of Alzheimer's disease, and he was becoming violent and would swear like a sailor that he was back in World War II.

Those were just a few examples; there was a list at least as long as my leg about incidents such as those. I always thought that I was strange, and J-Lo was the only one that I shared this information with. It wasn't that I didn't trust my other friends, because I did, I would trust them with my life. It was just that they always thought I was a bit on the weird side, from the way I dressed, from the variety of music that I listened to and the movies that I watched, all the way to the way I talked. What gave it away most though was the stuff that I wrote dark, depressing, sometimes even morbid, poetry and stories. I let them read some of it once, and after the reaction I got of horrified expressions and comments about therapy, I told them that I didn't write anymore.

Truth was that all those ideas I had for my work came from my dreams, both dreams that I had at night, when I had no control over them, and during the day, when yet again, I had no control over my thoughts. I shifted my weight and brushed my long hair behind my ears before standing up off my bed.

"I'm hungry." I stated, setting back down my stuffed rabbit and turning to Laura. "Want some breakfast?"

"You know I never turn down food," She said, leading the way to the kitchen.

Biscuits and cereal were still left on the table from where my sisters had eaten about twenty minutes before. The bread still warm and cereal still in the box, I got some cold milk from the refrigerator, grabbed a bowl and settled down at the corner chair at the bar with my food. Laura however went straight for the coffee, pouring us both a cup as I made two bowels of cereal.

I normally didn't eat breakfast, but today, it wasn't really as much as a breakfast as it was a lunch, since it was almost noon. During Christmas break no one around here, well, me and my sisters, woke up before eleven unless we had something to do. So it was a brunch type thing, and then dinner, no three meals for us.

 _Celebrate! The End of the World_


End file.
